Saturday, 14 November 2015

Luca Veste on Crime Fact vs Crime Fiction

Today’s guest blog is by author Luca Veste
who is of Italian and Scouse descent. He has a degree in criminology and is the
author of the Murphy & Rossi series of novels which are part police
procedural part psychological thriller set in Liverpool. Here he talks about
crime act vs crime fiction. More
information about Luca Veste can be found on his website.
You can also follow him on Twitter @lucaveste and find him on Facebook. His latest book is Bloodstream.

There's an aspect of modern life which is something of a bane for crime
writers. That is this statistic...

"The British
Security Industry Authority (BSIA) estimated there are up to 5.9 million
closed-circuit television cameras in the country, including 750,000
in “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals and care homes. The
survey’s maximum estimate works out at one for every 11 people in the UK
(Telegraph, 2013)"

We're almost at the point where if crime fiction was a little more
realistic, they'd be even shorter than a Morrissey 'novel'. Although, slightly
longer than one of his sentences.

I digress.

CCTV is seemingly everywhere, but in crime fiction I think we can
obscure this proliferation somewhat. We can hide bodies in more imaginative
places, we can have broken cameras, or poor images. Plus, I also wonder if most
people reading aren't aware of the sheer number of cameras tracking their
movements on a daily basis - although current Channel 4 series 'Hunted' has
probably lifted the lid for some.

There's another aspect of modern society which I think can have a
greater impact in making crime novels more difficult. That is social media.

When you consider the sheer numbers of people who use arguably the two
main sites - Facebook and Twitter - it's a wonder we get anything done at all.
In 2014, Facebook had 31
million unique users, and Twitter had just
under half that number (although growing at a faster rate than Facebook was).
That's a lot of people posting pictures of their children, links to the
Guardian or the Daily Mail, and angry replies to Katie Hopkins' latest
controversial statement.

What accompanies this, of course, is also opinion. As a species, we're
nothing if not an opinionated lot. With social media, we now have the ability
to share those opinions to a wider world, with the illusion of it actually
meaning anything. Therefore, when you have a major news event, a fair few
people are driven to have to share their outlook on what has happened. No matter what it is. From all sides of
political leanings, ages, genders. We're encouraged to do so. News channels
will publish postings from social media sites during their reporting. They'll
scour those sites, looking for comments to use as a basis for an outpouring of emotion/support/opinion.
Flashed across the screen, as a reporter with a serious voice reads out the
words with absolute neutrality.

How does this inform a crime novel - especially those of the type I
write? Well, crime novels

usually contain the most absurd of crimes. Murder.
And, for the most part, multiple murders. We're lucky to live in a country
where the murder rate is quite low and the serial murder rate is almost rock
bottom. However, it is by using the absurd when I feel we can explore more
interesting aspects of society and it is this dichotomy from which I begin each
book. Which leads me onto my new book Bloodstream. The initial catalyst for the
book was a different theme, but when I began writing it, another theme emerged.
That of 24 hours news culture, media and violence, and the impact of social
media on a police investigation. I realised this was something I wanted to
consider - with more focus from the outside, how does that effect a police
investigation? When everyone has an opinion, how does that make yours (as
someone supposedly official) somehow better?

On one side you have an investigation going on. Police and various other
departments, trawling through leads, interviewing witnesses, planning and
presenting evidence. On the other - you have commenters. People who believe
they know something more than those investigators do (which sometimes they
do!), and can't understand how they can see the truth, but those tasked to
discover it can't.

Social media has arguably greatly increased the impact major news events
now have on society. Live tweeting a tragedy, victims sharing their thoughts as
an incident is happening. It has now become standard for a perpetrator of a
major crime to have their online postings scoured for clues to his/her
personality. Selfies now become the new mug shot, shared across media for us to
scrutinise. To make assumptions about a person based on a fleeting moment in
their lives.

And that's what social media does - it allows you to make assumptions
about people in a short period of time, becoming judge and jury in front of and
amongst a baying audience. You can make mistakes without recourse, condemn
without worry. How does this culture effect our understanding and experience of
crime? Also, how does a news media, intent on keeping up with this change and
influence of social media, keep up and still stay at the forefront of the way
people receive news? That's one of the themes I wanted to explore with
Bloodstream.

Bloodstream by Luca Veste, Simon & Schuster £7.99

Social media
stars Chloe Morrison and Joe Hooper seem to have it all - until their bodies
are found following an anonymous phone call to their high-profile agent. Tied
and bound to chairs facing each other, their violent deaths cause a media scrum
to descend on Liverpool, with DI David Murphy and DS Laura Rossi assigned to the
case. Murphy is dismissive, but the media pressure intensifies when another
couple is found in the same manner as the first. Only this time the killer has
left a message. A link to a private video on the internet, and the words
'Nothing stays secret'. It quickly becomes clear that more people will die;
that the killer believes secrets and lies within relationships should have
deadly consequences...